


No Sleep Til Hawkmoth

by Redrikki



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alya Césaire Knows, Alya's hunt for hawkmoth, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 06:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21911335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/pseuds/Redrikki
Summary: An overly caffeinated epiphany helps narrow down Alya's search for Hawkmoth.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Alya Césaire & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug & Nino Lahiffe
Comments: 14
Kudos: 140
Collections: Hurt/Comfort Bingo - Round 10





	No Sleep Til Hawkmoth

**Author's Note:**

> Covers my hurt-comfort bingo square for exhaustion. And that's Bingo, baby!

If Alya hadn’t already been certain that Marinette and Adrien were Ladybug and Chat Noir, she would be now. After a week of late-night akumas, Marinette looked wrecked. The bags under her eyes had carry-ons and her outfit looked like it had been thrown together by a blind girl. Adrien seemed to be doing bit better, presumably thanks to the magic of make-up and a father who wouldn’t let him out of the house looking anything less than perfect. He kept nodding off, though, before jerking himself awake hard enough to give Alya whiplash.

Ladybug and Chat Noir had gone it alone for the first five nights. Five nights of longer and longer battles as they got progressively less and less sleep. Ladybug finally tapped Alya and Nino in on the sixth night after struggling for hours to defeat a phase-shifting akuma. Together, the four of them had handled it in ten minutes flat. Last night, on the other hand, had taken forever. 

It had been nearly 4 am by the time Alya had dragged herself back through her bedroom window. As if that hadn’t been bad enough, she’d been too hopped up on adrenaline to actually fall asleep. By the time her alarm went off, Alya had wanted to die, or possibly commit murder. The four shots of espresso with breakfast had helped, but now her hands kept shaking and her eyes felt like she’d rubbed them with sandpaper. 

Nino didn’t seem to be doing much better. He stumbled in and mumbled something which sounded vaguely like “Hey, dudes” before putting his head on the desk and going to sleep. 

“’T's a good idea,” Marinette slurred, laying her head down. “Sleep.” Her eyelids fluttered closed. 

For a second, Alya considered joining her before forcing herself up straighter. She would not succumb. She would make it through the day. Hawkmoth would not win this round. Caffeine and spite would keep her going. As long as she could picture Hawkmoth as just as exhausted and miserable as them, she could make it. 

She closed her eyes and went through Hawkmoth’s imagined day like a slide show. He cried when his alarm went off. He fell asleep on the bus and had to backtrack three stops. His boss yelled at him for sleeping at his desk. It was the last straw after all the time he spent in the bathroom akumatising random teenagers. He got fired. Seriously, how could he manage holding down a full-time job while being an around-the-clock supervillain? It hardly seemed possible. 

“Oh. My. God!” The force of the revelation propelled Alya from her seat. “Hawkmoth’s unemployed!”

“What?” Marinette jerked awake. “Who’s a hawkmoth? Where?”

Every eye in the classroom turned towards them. Wow. Awkward. Alya sank back down, curling her arm protectively around Marinette’s shoulders. 

“It’s okay, girl,” she said, gently stroking her friend’s hair until she put her head back down. “He’s not here.” 

Chloé’s lips curled into her trademarked sneer. “What? Are you saying Hawkmoth’s poor?"

“I don’t know,” Alya snapped. She really hadn’t thought all the way through her epiphany yet. “But I do know there’s no way he’s got a regular job when he’s busy akumatising people at all hours of the day and night.”

“Maybe he’s rich,” Adrien suggested, rubbing his eyes like an exhausted toddler. “My father makes his own hours.”

“Ridiculous!” Chloé turned away with a dismissive flick of her ponytail. “Utterly ridiculous!”

Except it wasn’t ridiculous, not at all. Adrien was definitely on to something. Alya pulled out her notes on Hawkmoth. Looking at the footage from Heroes Day, she’d made an estimate of his approximate height and weight. She flipped past her calculations and opened a new page. 

_Makes his own time,_ she wrote. _Unemployed? Retired? Rich?_

Absently tapping her pen, Alya considered her list. Out of the three, she was leaning more towards that last one. Hawkmoth’s entitled ass definitely gave off a Chloé-like rich people vibe. In fact, if he hadn’t already been akumatised, Gabriel Agreste probably would have been her chief suspect. He made his own time, his company logo was a butterfly, and he was a massive jerk. It couldn’t be him though which was almost too bad considering she knew Carapace would have loved kicking his butt.

She couldn’t rule out Hawkmoth being unemployed or retired just because he felt rich, but even those three options would help narrow down her search from every not previously akumatized white guy over six feet in Paris. Alya gripped her pen tight. “I’m coming for you, Hawkmoth,” she muttered. She would find him and, when she did, maybe she and her friends would finally be be able to sleep.


End file.
